Mount Rushmore

Monday 18th May
So today is the day. Today we visited Mount Rushmore.
Here is a little test.
Taking no more than one minute, what are your top 10 iconic locations in USA? (I will give mine at the end of this page).
We had been advised that the best way to approach Mt Rushmore is via Route 16A, from the South, called the Iron Mountain Road, which we did. This road is another iconic (that is the word for today) road, more than just a scenic byway. So we set out, managed to get a few miles up the sleepy, but beautiful, valley before the first coffeeshop loomed ahead. We stopped of course, only to find that it would not open until the next day. The owners were just off to Rapid City for supplies, but they made us a drink and left us to relax on the patio! Met a couple of nice young ladies who were here for the horse riding, they had brought their horses from Kansas for a week.
Now we started the climb up to Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain is the next mountain over from Mt Rushmore. The road winds and twists its way up to the top, be fore descending to Mt Rushmore. The guy who designed it had the monument in mind when he designed it. As the road twists there are three tunnels to pass through. Each of them is lined up so that its entrance/exit frames the four presidents of the monument, very impressive. There is also a wonderful viewing point at the highest point of the road. So twisty is the road that there are a couple of 'pigtails', where the road actually loops back over itself, via a bridge. We really enjoyed this road.
This brought us to Mt Rushmore, where we paid our fee and parked in the multistory car park. The sun was still shining, but there was a very cold wind, so instead of eating our picnic lunch we went into the restaurant and sat where Cary Grant sat in the film North by Northwest, no actually I lied, the restaurant in the film has now been knocked down to make way for this much bigger and more efficient restaurant, shame really, but there you are. However eating there meant that we could sit and look at/discuss the monument in relative comfort while we ate, as our table had a great view of it.
After we had eaten we continued walking up the central avenue that took us to the closest viewing point, past the avenue of state flags, where we interestingly noted that the Hawaii flag actually has a Union Jack as part of the design.
We went to the auditorium and watched the short video about the monument's history and then went back upstairs to the outdoor viewing area to take a good long look at the four presidents, memorizing each one. From our left they are President George Washington, President Thomas Jefferson, President Theodore Roosevelt and President Abraham Lincoln.
Having enjoyed a good long look we strolled back to the car and then drove home, stopping briefly at Bakers Bakery for a Goody.

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What was on your list?

Mine is (not in any order):

1. Empire State Building, New York
2. Twin Towers Site, New York
3. Golden Gate Bridge, California
4. Disneyland, California
5. Niagara Falls, New York
6. Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
7. Las Vegas Strip, Nevada
8. U.S.S. Arizona, Hawaii
9. Grand Canyon, Arizona
10. National Mall, Washington D.C.

I guess National Mall is a bit of a cheat as it contains Lincoln Mem,Wash. Monu., Smithsonian Museums and the Capitol - any of which would be on the top ten list.

Crazy Horse and The Needles

Sunday
We were expecting reasonable weather today, but while it started sunny it was also quite cold, so we didn't want to walk around outside much.
Just a few miles north of Custer is Crazy Horse Mountain Sculpture. After stopping at the Bakery in Custer we drove up and entered the quite large park. It is a very ambitious project, several hundred acres of land, with plans for a university and medical college as well as a cultural center and museum. If that sounds ambitious then you should see the centrepiece, which is the Crazy Horse Mountain Sculpture. This was started in 1948 when the then chief of the Lakota (formally known as Sioux) tribe engaged sculptor  Korczak Ziolkowski to produce a monument to the Indian, similar to the monument at Mt Rushmore. However this monument would sculpt the whole mountain. Ending up with a statue several hundred feet high, depicting Crazy Horse on a horse pointing towards the hills, showing where his lands are. (Crazy Horse was a chief in the 1870's, stabbed to death by a soldier, with a bayonet, in Fort Robinson, NE in 1877). So far, after more than 50 years, half of the head and the top of the arm have been completed. So it is a work where the journey is as important as the destination. We toured the visitor center and stood and looked at this marvel in rock, which dwarf's it's counterpart of Mt Rushmore (which however is finished).
This mountain sculpture is not just a memorial to Crazy Horse, it is a rallying cry to the Indian Nations and though it is not said, it a monument to the wrongs that have been done to them, as Crazy Horse was the focal point of the Indian resistance to White America in the Nineteenth Century. We were quite impressed.

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After visiting Crazy Horse we took advantage of the Custer SP Open Day to take a ride round the Northern section of the park, a section called The Needles.
This is a road which winds along the top of a series of granite mountain tops and bluffs, quite reminiscent of the Blue Ridge Mountain Highway in NC and Virginia. It is only a few miles long, but very dramatic, partly due to the views, partly due to the very narrow road and its tunnels, mostly due to the needle like formations of the the granite rock. These needles soar dramatically into the air sometimes over a hundred feet and are very impressive. The tunnels are very narrow, the first one is only about a foot wider than our Chevy, but didn't seem that wide at all.
After the needles the road twisted and turned downhill alongside a small mountain stream, which was a very pretty route to follow. The road eventually comes out near to the Legion Lake Lodge, giving us a short ride back home.
Another super day in the Black Hills.

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N.B. Wanting to give a picture intro to the slide show I cropped a pic from Street View, only to find that the Google Crew had been passing through during Sturgis Bike Week - I wonder if that caused chaos?

Wind Cave and Custer State Park

Saturday.                                                                                                                   You can listen to this while you read  

Hurray! The sun is out, it is a beautiful day! We pack up a picnic and head south to Wind Cave NP. We had sort of made arrangement with the Park Ranger to visit today, as they need to make special arrangements for wheelchair users.
Wind Cave is a very large cave system, some 440 miles of it! We only expected to do a part of that. We were met by a very pleasant ranger, who loaded us into an elevator and took us a hundred feet below ground to a part of the cave system. Wind cave is special in several ways, first of all though it is large it only has very small access to the outside world, so it breathes! As the air pressure outside changes so air must move in or out to equalise that, sometimes the wind can get up to 50 m.p.h, so they say, however there was a gentle breeze as we left the elevator to enter the Garden of Eden cavern.
Here it was explianed that the caverns are limestone, though it seems that the water erosion simply exaggerated the cracks that were already in the rock. It seems that the limestone was formed 350 million yeasrs ago, but around 65 million years ago a batholith (basaltic domelike intrusion) lifted the limestone over a large area. In being lifted the limestone cracked causing many fissures which the ground water exploited to make a large network of caverns. This made for a very interesting map of the caverns. These caverns are characterised by showing very few of the traditional forms of stalagmites and stalactites.
We were then taken further down to The Assembly Rooms, which were much larger and contained the unique BoxWork phenomena. The box work lattice are made from calcite. It seems that water percolated through a layer of gypsum above the limestone, dissolving the gypsum, which was then deposited in cracks in the lower limestone. The Gypsum then hardened to Calcite. Over time the limestone was removed by chemical erosion, leaving a strange latticework of calcite, very pretty.
Well as usual we really enjoyed our tour of the cave, and as usual it took much longer than anticipated. We emerged again into the sunlight and moved on. It was now the turn of Custer State Park to entertain us.

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The first piece of good news was that this weekend was their 'Open Weekend'. Entry was free!! So we set out on to the Wildlife Loop. The scenery was very pretty, rolling hills and prairie. We stopped at 'Prairie Dog Town' and watched their antics for a while as we ate our picnic lunch. They are very funny.

We rode on and saw lots of other wildlife, we saw many more bison, lots of them had a calf in tow, often they were very close, they seemed more tame than those in Yellowstone.
Then we ran into the 'Begging Burros'. A herd of burros who, as soon as you stopped the car, put their heads through any open window, begging for food.  There were several very cute foals of various sizes and colour. This was a very popular stopping place for visitors, many of whom had brought apples and carrots to feed the burros.
On our trip round the Wildlife Loop we saw quite a few pronghorn, some deer and some very pretty bluebirds as well as a song thrush.
Finally we stopped at place called Legion Lake Lodge, where, as part of the open weekend we could attend an 'Ice Cream Social', complete with a free scoop of Blue Bunny ice cream. So we had a coff/T as well and watched the geese with their goslings on the lake.
All in all a very pleasant day in the Black Hills.

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Custer in The Black Hills

Friday

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Well just for a change it looks like the weather will deteriorate after the weeknd, so we have decided to hang out here in Custer for a whole week!That is going to make a change as it is pouring with rain today.
Custer is sort of in the middle of the Southern part of the Black Hills. As well as the town itself and the very pretty scenery close by. To the south is one part of Custer State Park - known as the Wildlife Loop, while south of that is Wind Cave National Park. To the North is the Crazy Horse Mountain Sculpture, nearby is the Northern section of Custer State Park, known as The Needles. While a good way further North is the Mount Rushmore Monument. So it is a good place to see most of the attractions of the area.
Today however there was very little worth seeing, except the rain. We had a slow day at home. In the afternoon the rains stopped so we went and explored Custer. We went into Shopco and then went for a meal in a very forgettable family diner, quite a miserable day really. Tomorrow should be better.

Road To Custer

Thursday

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We moved North and very quickly left Nebraska and entered South Dakota. At last the Chevy was home! We had registered our vehicles in South Dakota in October 2012, mostly in order to save a lot on our car insurances, so we are also officially South Dakota Residents, so it was a homecoming for us as well, though it didn't really feel any different.
We made quick time to Custer and the Custer's Gulch RV park, stopping for a coff/T in Hot Springs and a quick look in at Wind Cave NP, though we planned to return there later. We were starting to enjoy the scenery as the prairies gave way to hills and then mountains, the Black Hills of Dakota The We Love.

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Nebraska

Wednesday
We could have made it from Fort Laramie to the Black Hills of Dakota in one long hop, but decided that we would slide Eastwards a but to 'do' Nebraska. We would stay for one night in a place called Chadron. We discovered that there is a lot of prairie in Nebraska, we know because we drove through a lot of it, even though we only scraped at one corner of the state. On our way to Chadronwhile still in Wyoming, we stopped for a coffee at a place called Higher Grounds in Lusk, whre we met an English couple who were on a 5 day break from home! Arriving in Denver and driving to Mt Rushmore then South into Nebraska. Needless to say they were driving a white Mustang Convertible! Once into Nebraska we called in at Fort Robinson, this was the fort that replaced Fort Laramie and became the centre for keeping the peace around the Black Hills and West of them. It is also the place where Crazy Horse was killed (murdered?) on sept 5th 1877 while resisting being confined in a cell. He was fatally stabbed in the back by a bayonet.
Our overnight stay in Chadron was not particularly noteworthy. It has a Walmart, which we visited. We ate at a bar/grill, which was OK. We used the laundry on the campground to catch up on the washing.

Lots to do in Guernsey

Tuesday 12th
We awoke to clear sunny skies and the mighty roar of trains carrying their 20,000 tons of coal Eastwards.
Still it was good to be up and away in good time. Today we were going to 'do' some more of the Oregon Trail, as it passed along the North Platte River. This must have been one of the more comfortable bits of the journey, plenty of grass and water, flat land, though it was probably hot, there is also plenty of shade.
After walking along the river bank, having crossed the river at Fort Laramie, they were able to rest for a while at a pasture that ran up to some cliffs, known as Register Cliffs, as many of the emigrants had carved their names in the soft mudstone. Those names are still there today as a memorial and testament to those who traveled this way between 1840 and 1860. Although all seemed well there were constant threats of cholera and dysentery, of running out of food, or feed. Always there was the drive of knowing that they had to get to the Cascades before the first snow of winter, or they would starve on the cold Eastern slopes. Although we have not been there, a key point on their journey was another rock where they carved their names. Independence Rock, about 120 miles West, which the Emigrants tried to reach by July 4th. Sally and I sat and had our picnic here. It was very pleasant and warm in the sun.
Earlier we had been to the site of some ruts made by the carts of the Emigrants heading West. At this point the travelers had to climb up from the North Platte Valley Floor to the rolling hills above. Here they had to move across bare rock and grass land. The rock is a fairly soft sandy limestone, so the heavy carts wore ruts in the rock. This was very interesting as some of the ruts were several feet deep. We think that some of the trail was cut into the rock to make for easy passage, but some of the ruts were just too deep to have been made purposely, we thought that they were the result of the carts moving across them. It was not as straightforward as it seemed, as there are many wagon routes all running across this area, as though the route had been changed frequently, perhaps when one wore out they moved it, or perhaps when it rained it got too muddy. Anyway it was very enjoyable, interesting and thought provoking to see this evidence of the migration westward in the eighteenth century.

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On our way back through Guernsey we stopped off at the Presbyterian Church and surprisingly found Anne Miner, the minister that we had chatted to in the Cheyenne Museum ,was doing some work there, so we had another very nice chat and a tour of the lovely country church before leaving Guernsey.
We finished our day by visiting some real Ghost Towns, Hartville and Sunshine. They are not old ghost towns, they have only recently been emptied, when the iron ore mine closed down. In the case of Sunshine the town was bulldozed and removed completely. Hartville is now just a pretty little hamlet, with lots of closed up shops. It was interesting to drive through. The transient nature of mining means that there are many such towns in Wyoming, indeed throughout the Western States. We returned to the RV Park and I took a short walk to see a bison and some emu that we had noticed in a field. Interesting combination.

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